Top Reasons Your Customers Might Leave Your Business

why customers leave

The average business loses between 10-25% of their customers every year.

While thriving and evolving companies are able to attract new leads to replace normal losses, few focus on understanding why customers leave in the first place.

Plus, as it’s roughly five times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one, this constant cycle can seriously eat into your company’s profits.

What if, instead of putting all of your resources and energy into attracting new customers, you stopped to focus on how to improve customer service? What if you investigated the reasons why you’re losing customers and decided to make smart, affordable changes that help to extend the customer lifecycle?

This post is here to help you make that happen.

Read on to learn the truth about why customers leave and how investing in the right software can encourage them to stay — and even to spread the word about your business to others.

1. They Don’t Feel They’re Seen as Individuals 

Especially in today’s world, one of the biggest reasons why customers leave is because they feel as though your company sees them as a nameless, faceless unit of consumers that exist to help you to generate a profit — not as individuals with unique needs and specific interests.

We’re already living in the era of personalization.

In fact, studies show that over 40% of customers will work with a business again after a personalized shopping experience, that close to 50% will buy a product they weren’t initially interested in because of personalized recommendations, and that 40% of shoppers spent more than they intended to because of personalized marketing and communication.

However, if you want to truly understand how to keep customers, you’ll have to take that personalization to the next level.

Remember that personalized marketing and communications shouldn’t just happen in an email campaign.

Your invoices, contracts, letters, and any other kind of customer communication should also include personalized information and data. Generic mass communications are simply no longer effective.

It’s not just about using a customer’s first and last name, it’s about working to segment your market, make the best possible recommendations based on purchase histories, communicate in the language and medium they prefer, and more.

2. They Lose Interest in Your Products/Services 

While losing customers happens in every business, if you don’t take the time to understand exactly where your customers stop interacting with your website, brand, and products/services as a whole, you’re going to lose even more of them.

In order to keep your customers, you have to engage them at every point of the customer journey. This way, they’ll be more likely to want to try out new products/services and share them with others.

You need to start thinking about the different experiences that you’re able to offer your customers. You also need to focus on finding out exactly where in the customer journey consumers start to lose interest. Additionally, you need software that helps to identify customers who are at risk of leaving as soon as possible, so that you can take steps to keep them.

Enter the power of customer journey mapping.

This allows you to engage directly with consumers at the most critical moments in their buying journey and allows you to see the customer experience in real time.

3. You’re Not Communicating with Them in the Right Way

It’s easy for companies to get so caught up in how often they communicate with their customers that they end up completely overlooking whether or not the specific ways they’re communicating with customers are actually effective.

For example, about 60% of people aged 55 and older value face-to-face or print communication, while millennials much prefer texting and email communication.

Some customers may prefer to handle customer service questions and even learn about new products/services on social media. Others want to receive a detailed printed invoice after every purchase, while many may prefer getting the invoice emailed to them.

Your customer communications strategy absolutely must focus not only on delivering communications and documents using the medium that each customer prefers, but also on omnichannel engagement.

After all, especially now, customers and leads aren’t likely to interact with your company on just one digital or print platform. They’ll follow you on social media, read your blog posts, subscribe to your e-newsletters, and sign up to receive text/SMS alerts from your brand.

You also need to keep that level of communication consistent across all of your customer service and marketing channels. This means using the same graphics, tone, and even letting customers “pick up where they left off” across channels.

Omnichannel marketing increases your revenue, engages your customers and makes them feel appreciated, and shortens the length of the average customer journey.

It also helps you to avoid spending money needlessly on marketing materials that won’t actually end up being effective.

You Know Why Customers Leave. Now, Get Them to Stay

We hope this post has helped you to understand not only why customers leave, but the steps that you can take to get them to stay with your business.

Remember to focus on omnichannel communication, customer journey mapping, and personalized communications.

Of course, we know that it can feel daunting to find the time and resources to do adopt — and continually monitor — all of these customer retention strategies. Our incredible software is here to make it happen for you so that you can focus on developing new ideas and keeping your company running smoothly.

Request your demo to learn more about how our software can improve the customer experience, increase customer retention rates, and give your profits the boost you’ve been looking for.

We can’t wait to help you make every customer count.